TRANSIT took note of the following article describing legal issues that will delay the approval of the Kinrara-Damansara Expressway.

Apparently the company that will build the expressway and has received ‘conditional approval’ from the Works Ministry and support from Selangor Menteri Besar Khalid Ibrahim, has failed to get approval from the Majlis Bandaraya Petaling Jaya…in fact their plans have been rejected 3 times!

KiDEx Sdn Bhd may face a major setback in its plan to build its RM2.42 billion super-elevated highway in Selangor as it has not obtained approval from the city’s local council office.

The Malay Mail Online understands that the proposal for the controversial Kinrara-Damansara Expressway (KIDEX) was rejected on three occasions by the Petaling Jaya Municipal Council (MBPJ) as developers had failed to provide sufficient details on the project.

TRANSIT took note of the following article describing changes to bus service in Johor Baru, with a new “no pick up” order for Jalan Wong Ah Fook, diversion of urban stage buses to Larkin Sentral, and a new free shuttle bus connecting the two areas.

JOHOR Baru City Council has come up with a solution to the the problem of traffic congestion in Jalan Wong Ah Fook, which it believes is caused by the long queue of stage buses waiting for passengers.

The council recently announced that effective May 1, all stage buses plying the northwest route, which is basically the Skudai corridor, may only drop off passengers by the road. They will not be allowed to pick up passengers.

TRANSIT took note of this news from Ipoh, where Ipoh City Council is looking to reorganize and improve its focus on public transport services. As is typical we see bluster and calls for enforcement but little about the structural problems within the public transport industry.

TRANSIT took note of the following interesting article, which describes Prasarana refusing to pay compensation to the residents of the Tong Weng Mansion in Brickfields, while agreeing to pay compensation to two other site owners in the area.

The compensation requests are in relation to the KL Monorail expansion project, which will extend the KL Monorail from the Tun Sambanthan station down to MidValley and to Old Klang Road on the other side of the Federal Highway.

Interestingly enough, all three compensation requests are in relation to properties that are illegally occupying government land – a situation that seems to occur more frequently than one might expect.

The Express Rail Link from KL Sentral to KLIA2 will commence operations when the airport terminal opens to the public on May 2. There is more good news in store.

The airport’s rail company Express Rail Link (ERL) is allowing 1,000 people to have free trial rides to KLIA2 on Malaysian Airports Holdings Berhad’s KLIA2 Open Day on Sunday. Those interested can register on a first-come first-served basis from tomorrow at http://www.kliaekspres.com.

Proposals for elevated walkways in Kuala Lumpur often use the walkway network in Hong Kong as an examplar.

The walkways in Hong Kong … with outdoor and indoor connections … was built as a result of crowding on the narrow streets of Hong Kong Island especially in the Central and Wan Chai districts. This network was extended further west and east as development increased, and is being supplemented by elevated walkways in West and East Kowloon.

We cannot simply import technology or ideas from other places without adapting them to the challenges that we face in Kuala Lumpur…and in order to understand these ideas then we need to learn as much about them as possible.

A walkway network for Kuala Lumpur is an important addition to the pedestrian realm but should not be used in place of a real network of pedestrian places at street level…and must be supported by efforts to maintain safety and security.

TRANSIT invites our readers to view the links above and comment below about walkways and pedestrian places in Kuala Lumpur and Malaysia.

This comes after the first two trains were delivered by Scomi Rail in Rawang to the depot in Brickfields for testing and commissioning in late January of 2014New four car monorail trains arrive at depot (The Star, 25 January 2014)

The new 4 carriage trains can carry 430 passengers and will have space for wheelchairs. The monorail stations are being retrofitted with chair lifts (presumably the ones that attach to stairways? Or proper lifts?) and work is expected to be finished soon.

TRANSIT Says:

As you can imagine, we are pleased to see improvements to our public transport services…even incremental ones. The KL Monorail is already a decade old and was horribly over capacity in 2005…so the new carriages are a welcome addition.

Indeed, seeing 4-carriage monorail trains may help raise public confidence that the monorail can be more than just a “toy train” and there may be demand for applications of monorail technology in other cities in the Klang Valley, such as Petaling Jaya in place of the proposed Kinrara Damansara Expressway. TRANSIT has long said that the Sunway BRT line with its RM100 million per km cost, might have been better as a monorail … and could have been extended to connect to the Kelana Jaya LRT Line at Kelana Jaya and the Ampang LRT Line at Puchong.

While the 7 month period of testing and commissioning is a bit of a surprise, we expect that this is also related to the re signalling of the monorail system which will allow for faster train movements.

Overall TRANSIT is pleased but will reserve final judgment until we ride the new trains.

Mohd Nur Kamal, chief executive of the Land Public Transport Commission which just turned 1 in January, tells Tan Choe Choe that his agency is looking at several options but more time is needed to come up with the best solution to the national bus crisis.